Little big triumphs

At the 60th Berlinale, the loudest cheers were reserved for My Name is Khan, from the epiglottis. But there were eight other Indian films, six of them mint fresh, that won applause for their courage. None more so than an absurdist drama centred around the mythical village of Peepli in th

At the 60th Berlinale, the loudest cheers were reserved for My Name is Khan, from the epiglottis. But there were eight other Indian films, six of them mint fresh, that won applause for their courage. None more so than an absurdist drama centred around the mythical village of Peepli in the state of Mukhya Pradesh, that mocks not only contemporary Indian politics but also TRP-chasing TV channels.

Omkar Das Manikpuri in Peepli Live

Directed by former TV news producer Anusha Rizvi, 34, and produced by actor Aamir Khan, Peepli Live is both hilarious and tragic as it traces the attempt of one dispossessed farmer, Natha, to commit suicide so his family can claim the Rs 1 lakh compensation due to victims' families and save their auctioned farm.

Shot in the village of Badwai in Madhya Pradesh over 64 days in one go and made in collaboration with 5,000 villagers, many of whom played minor characters and many of whose old clothes were borrowed by the actors, the Rs 6.5-crore film talks about virtually every major contemporary controversy with a light touch.

With Raghubir Yadav in a principal role as Natha's brother and Naseeruddin Shah in a special appearance as an oily minister who thinks he's suave, it has characters who are easily recognisable and so doubly funny. The female star anchor on first name terms with all politicians, the Hindi news star who is chummy with politicians from the heartland, the tea-drinking bureaucrat who refers everything to the High Court, the politician who is jealous because the star anchor went to "Jaitley's party" and the caste-playing politician who wants to win an election at all costs.

At one point, Natha's family has a "Lal Bahadur", a handpump given under a scheme named after the former prime minister, and a TV gifted by a rival politician, but no food to eat. The bureaucrats, as they wait for Natha to commit suicide, scratch their heads, trying to offer him an "Indira Awas", which is only for the homeless and a "Jawahar Rozgar", which is only for the jobless, until they discover that government schemes cover farmers only when they die. There is a happy ending to the movie off-screen though--at the end of the shoot, the producers built a road for the villagers, who gave them a whacky song on inflation in return.

Though Aamir, its producer, was sorely missed by the publicists, Rizvi handled the questions well, talking at length about how she had "stalked" the star via email in 2004. He thought it was a prank because her film was then called The Falling and he was working on The Rising. If in Rizvi's film the city came to Peepli and left only when the story was told, or sold, then in 50-year-old Dev Benegal's Road, Movie, the city travels with the desert.

Shot in Rajasthan and Kutch in Gujarat over 60 days, the film starring actor-onthe-edge Abhay Deol and the female Irrfan Khan, Tannishtha Chatterjee, tracks the story of a simple young man, Vishnu, whose family wants him to sell hair oil, but who is more interested in a little adventure, delivering a truck with a travelling cinema.

With clips from Buster Keaton and Amitabh Bachchan films from Zanjeer to Deewar, the journey sets the stage for several dream like sequences involving a circus, a group of women travelling miles for water, an encounter with a brutal police officer, and as is now expected from Deol, some extreme scenes.

Rituparno Ghosh and Indraneil Sengupta in Aarekti Premer Golpo

If he was tied to a bed and raped in Ek Chaalis ki Last Local and made to bathe in a tub in Dev.D, here he not only smokes ganja, has sex with Tannishtha's gypsy but also has a defecation scene in the middle of the desert. And he says, sitting in the lounge of the Berlinale Palast, where huge signed posters of stars, among them Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol, are mounted on the walls, "This is very tame. I'd like to go as far as I possibly can." He finds it harder to play "likeable than unlikeable characters" and he may well get a chance to challenge himself again in a new film he's ready to do, a road movie set in Spain, directed by Zoya Akhtar and starring Hrithik Roshan and Farhan Akhtar.

Berlinale did indeed dance with danger, whether it was Casey Affleck bludgeoning Jessica Alba after having lusty sex with her in Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me that had people gripping their seats in shock, or whether it was Mark Ruffalo going at it with his lesbian donor mother, Julianne Moore, in Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right. Which is why it was good to see Indian films pushing some boundaries too.

Chittaranjan Giri in Paltadacho Munis

In 41-year-old Kaushik Ganguly's Aarekti Premer Golpo, which was shown in the often radical Panorama section, director Rituparno Ghosh makes a stunning acting debut. He plays a gay documentary film director working on a film on Chapli Babu, or Chapal Bhaduri, a transgender Jatra actor. Their lives intertwine, with their love lines mirroring each other's. Hugely different from the pulp usually churned out by Bengali cinema, the film is somewhat melodramatic yet quaintly charming. As well one supposes shocking, with Indraneil Sengupta, playing a bisexual cameraman, locking lips with Ghosh, who came dressed in character to the premiere in flowing clothes and turban

Thirty-four-year-old Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni's Vihir, (The Well) in Marathi, and 38-year-old Laxmikant Shetgaonkar's Paltadacho Munis (The Man Beyond the Bridge), in Konkani, are examples of filmmakers choosing their own languages to express themselves though they live within Bollywood's radar. As Shetgaonkar said to a nearly full hall after his film, "I wanted to say something to my people though there are only 18 theatres in Goa which host the International Film Festival of India."

Girish Kulkarni in Vihir

Kulkarni's second film, produced by AB Corp, is a gentle, beautifully shot movie about death and how it affects a boy. The feeling of familial togetherness that pervades the screen could only have come from a cast that knew each other well, which it did, having at various times starred in Kulkarni's shorts made at Pune's FTII. Kulkarni is one among the many resurgent FTIIans who have travelled the world with their films and are trying to experiment with style and substance.

Another, Abhaya Simha, a filmmaker from Bangalore, was also in Berlin as part of the Goethe Institute's Visitor's Programme, getting ready to make his bilingual film in Kannada and Malayalam with superstar Mammooty. Shetgaonkar's film, produced by NFDC, a meditative comment on life in a tiny village overrun by caste divisions and religious superstitions, was also well-received, being only the seventh film ever to be made in Konkani.

Both Vihir and Paltadacho Munis were made at budgets of Rs 1 crore, which is usually what a big Bollywood movie spends on one song. As Kulkarni says, "It takes two years of your life and involves a cast and crew of 100 people. We need bigger budgets." Passion drives them yes, but their pockets should also be full. But the festival was full of little big triumphs, with Indian films participating in the greater good of what Wieland Speck, director of the Panorama section of the festival, called, "lifting carpets, touching taboos". What's more, the films found a market. If Peepli Live was sold to the Germans and Polish, Paltadacho Munis was sold to the Canadians.

And yes, over 20,000 fans came out in the frozen snow to cheer Shah Rukh Khan, only 5,000 of whom were Indians. Leonardo Di Caprio, who along with his Shutter Island director Martin Scorsese, spent over an hour hanging out with Shah Rukh and Karan Johar in their room at the Regent Hotel, would have been jealous.

Movies making news

Road, MovieDirector: Dev BenegalA journey across the desert where its star Abhay Deol plays, as usual, a "person on the periphery of society".

Peepli LiveDirector: Anusha RizviA comic take on farmers' suicides that mocks politics and news television. No one is spared.

Aarekti Premer GolpoDirector: Kaushik GangulyMovie within a movie about a transgender actor shot by a gay director. Melodramatic but touching.

Paltadacho MunisDirector: Laxmikant ShetgaonkarOnly the 7th Konkani film ever about an inter-caste relationship and how it affects a village.

VihirDirector: Umesh Vinayak KulkarniMarathi film about howthe death of a young boy affects his cousin as the family gets together for a marriage.

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